Random classic She-Ra review! Well not that random, since I mentioned this one a couple posts ago.
This one opens with Catra presenting Hordak a berry pie. Hordak is a trusting soul when it comes to his subordinates and gobbles it down. Imp bounces into the throne room with intelligence on the Rebels of Whispering Woods. When they leave the room, Skeletor pops out of hiding to have a chat with Catra.
It turns out that Skeletor does his own baking, and this pie was baked with doomberries, which cause whoever eats them to fade out of existence over a matter of many hours. Skeletor believes that Horde Prime will need him to replace Hordak if this happens, which certainly raises questions about how the Horde appoints planetary commanders. It’s also not clear what Catra’s motive is, since she talks like she’ll still just be a Force Captain. I guess she just likes Skeletor better than Hordak.
Meanwhile, Hordak and a force of Horde Troopers attack the Rebels and manage to whisk Glimmer off to the Fright Zone as a prisoner. But in the midst of this display of competence, Hordak suddenly becomes sick and weak from that pie he trustingly ate.
(The first improvement I noticed in the reboot was that Glimmer’s powers worked consistently.)
So now the Great Rebellion has the commander of their planet’s occupation force as a sick prisoner. So what does She-Ra do? Fly her winged unicorn to magical advisor Light Hope to ask for a cure for Hordak.
OK, considering that by the end of the movie/5-part pilot that introduced these characters, She-Ra was telling Hordak “Leave Etheria forever!”, you’d think this calls for some unpacking, but writer Carol Baxter’s not giving us that. I don’t know if it was the heads of Filmation, some child psychologist they hired (the late Lou Scheimer’s daughter Erika has talked about doing this because they cared about their stories being appropriate to the audience’s age) or what, but this show was allergic to just saying “I still care because, while he’s evil, he’s my dad.”
Anyway, Light Hope tells her that the only cure for doomberry poisoning is tears. So someone’s going to have to cry for Hordak. She returns to his sickbed in Whispering Woods and asks him who might shed tears for his situation. Is he going to say “Imp”, whom he always dotes on and was established at the beginning of this episode? His runaway daughter Adora, for the superhero “you don’t know that I’m…” gag?
“Noah, the old wizard of Woeful Mountain would help me! He taught me my magic.”
Whaaat? Uh, Hordak, exactly how long have you lived on Etheria?
J. Michael Straczynski claims that he and Larry DiTillio were the story editors for She-Ra, and the reason they left between Seasons 1 and 2 was because Filmation wasn’t crediting them or giving additional pay for that work. And in the continuity as JMS understood it, the galaxy-spanning Horde was still in the process of conquering primitive Etheria when Castaspella was ~10 years old.
(That’s a pre-Horde Shadow Weaver with her in the JMS-written “The Price of Power”.) Plus the Sorceress of Grayskull told Adora “we searched for the dimension where Hordak took you but could not find it”, which is circumstantial evidence for Hordak only coming to Etheria after she was born.
Anyway, She-Ra carries Hordak up Woeful Mountain, while Catra attacks them. There won’t be any repercussions for open treason against Hordak in future episodes, which is explained as him suffering memory problems during his fading sickness. They make up to the top and meet Noah, who Skeletor has trapped in a force bubble. So what does the wizard who was Skeletor’s magic teacher’s magic teacher have to say?
NOAH: [to Hordak] Once I would have helped you, but you took all the years of magical training I gave you and turned it all to evil. You’re no friend of mine anymore.
SHE-RA: Don’t you have any feelings? Have you no sympathy for his suffering?
SKELETOR: [CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR-LINE] Of course I don’t have feelings! What sort of villain do you take me for?
NOAH: [CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR-LINE] The only suffering I sympathize with is that which he’s inflicted on this entire planet for years… and which he’ll CONTINUE to inflict until he’s done away with forever.
SHE-RA: I don’t believe you can just stand there and watch someone suffering, someone you have the power to help! Once Hordak was powerful. Now he’s alone, abandoned, unloved! It’s wrong… and it’s SAD.
NOAH: [CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR-LINE] Naturally he’s abandoned and alone. That’s because he’s an unloving person who doesn’t RESPOND to sympathy! What you’re asking me to do wouldn’t help him at all; it would just let him create more strife all over Etheria!
[something about caring]
NOAH: [CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR-LINE] Oh, they’ll care, all right. When he’s gone, all of Etheria will cry - with joy!
SHE-RA: [CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR-LINE] You don’t think that’s sad? The very idea of anybody being so feared and hated that others would actually rejoice at their… at their - their… [breaks down and can’t continue]
SKELETOR: You’re crying for Hordak? I don’t believe it!
NOAH: How can you cry for someone like him?
SHE-RA: I’m not just crying for Hordak. I’m crying for the saddest thing I know: a wasted life. To be given that most precious gift - the gift of living - to do with as we choose… I’m crying because this man has chosen to throw it away. And when he’s gone, nobody will care.
… with that, Hordak is cured, Skeletor runs away, and Noah teleports Hordak and She-Ra back to his throne room. She-Ra breaks Glimmer out of her cell and they book it on Swift Wind. Oh, and Bow is in this episode too. The episode ends at an outdoor dining table in Whispering Woods, where the Rebels seem rather blase about their leader saving Hordak’s life and not even keeping him as a POW, which she justifies as “What’s important is that I know I helped another human being, and that makes me feel good.”
(Pictured: another human being.)
Possible plot holes aside, this is a great episode. It’s a victim of the format of American TV in general at the time, in that we never get to see the status quo disrupted. We learn more about Adora/She-Ra’s feelings for Hordak and we learn that he was not an evil man (so to speak…) when he was a magic student, but there’s never a deeper understanding of what Adora wants. After running away from Hordak to join the Rebellion but also treating him like this when he was at his most vulnerable, what’s her endgame?
That’s for the fandom to figure out.
